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Crossfire's development history started in mid-1992.[1] It originally started as a Gauntlet clone[2] developed by Frank Tore Johansen at the University of Oslo, Norway.[3] After a name change in that same year and brief hosting time at University of California Berkeley (Jul-1999 to Jan-2001), the project now resides at SourceForge[4] where development continues.

Crossfire started with just one indoor map and then increased to 4 indoor-maps with one-way portals from level 1 to level 4. Upon clearing the last level, there was nothing more for the player to do. Spells were limited to magic bullet (the first spell), fireball, magic missile, burning hands and lightning bolt. Later, when two-way portals were implemented, development and content contribution expanded greatly.

Crossfire has since grown to encompass over 150 monsters, about 3000 maps to explore, an elaborate magic system, 13 races, 15 character classes, a system of skills, and many artifacts and treasures.

Crossfire has the feel of certain other games, especially Gauntlet and roguelike games such as NetHack or Angband. Any number of players can connect and play on the public servers, finding and using items and battling monsters. They can choose to cooperate or compete in the same world which includes both static and randomly generated content. It is a client and server based game with the ability to be played over the Internet, on a local network setting, or on a single computer setup.

Crossfire is based in a medieval fantasy world and is similar to other games of this genre. Players can choose any of the 13 races from dragons (fire hatchlings) to quetzalcoatl as well as the more average human and elf. They can also play as one of 15 classes or professions which range from alchemist to a monk to a warrior. The game consists of a comprehensive skill system that has experience levels in each skill, rather than just general experience points. As a result, it is realistic in that the skills the player uses are the skills that are improved.

Once the character creation process is complete, players enter the game world and pick from the two starting towns, Scorn or Navar. Although there are many quests, the game leans towards hack and slash adventuring with other players. With thousands of different maps spread out over a full-sized continent, the game has plenty of room to explore.

Crossfire was used as the base of a number of commercial and free MMORPGs, such as Wyvern, a Java rewrite,[5]Graal Kingdoms, which closed its code and content,[6] and Daimonin, which only used the server code but features an isometric view and a different project philosophy focused on a single main server.[7]Deliantra[8] is another fork of the Crossfire project, primarily aiming to improve the quality of its code and in-game content.